Cultivating Place

Nurturing – that’s what comes to mind when I think of the work of Blanca Diaz also known as Mama Maiz. Blanca is a practicing doula and herbalist whose work takes her around the country teaching and practicing plant based healing. She nurtures new mothers as they prepare to bring new life into our world, and she nurtures plants for their wisdom, healing and beauty. She nurtures community from the ground up sharing, as she says: “what she has been called and given permission to share.” Blanca believes in, studies and shares with others the power of plants, especially the native plants of our own regions and our relationships to them, in an effort to bring healing, well-being and greater understanding into our lives. Mama Maiz shares with Cultivating Place this week Join us. The show is available as a podcast on iTunes, Google Play and Stitcher. For photos and more, visit CultivatingPlace.com.

This week on Cultivating Place we’re joined by Uk based garden designer Jinny Blom, whose new book is entitled “The Thoughtful Gardener: an intelligent approach to garden design”. After 17 years and more than 250 gardens designed around the globe, Jinny shares with us her thoughtful, creative, musical and heartfelt perspective and process. Join us! You can download or subscribe to the Cultivating Place podcast on iTunes or Stitcher.

No matter where you live, the native plants of that area help define the beauty, history and meaning of all life there – from the soil, to the birds and bugs and mammals – four legged and two legged. On Cultivating Place this week we’re joined by the California Native Plant Society to hear more about the state of our native plants and their upcoming Conservation Conference Jan. 30-Feb. 3, 2018. Join us! Read more and see additional photos at CultivatingPlace.com.

This week on Cultivating Place, we’re joined by a gardener who lives and works beneath the great, big beautiful Sky of Austin, Texas –one of many real gardening epi-centers in our country. Linda Lehmusvirta is a home gardener and gardening advocate in Austin, and as the Producer of a weekly program on KLRU-TV, PBS in Austin she is most well known as The Central Texas Gardener. Join us. Read more and see additional photos at CultivatingPlace.com.

Elizabeth Lawrence was one of the grand dames of American horticulture in the 1900s. She was not only an avid gardener, but the first trained and licensed woman landscape architect out of the landscape architecture program at University of North Carolina, Raleigh. She designed, gardened and experimented with planting zones enthusiastically in her Charlotte, North Carolina, home and garden from the late 1940s through the mid 1980s. Perhaps most importantly, she shared her experiences and knowledge widely through her beautiful and plentiful garden writing in books, articles and correspondence with other gardeners and horticulturists around the globe. This week on Cultivating Place we're joined by Andrea Sprott, Curator since 2010 of the Elizabeth Lawrence House and Garden in Charlotte, NC, to hear more about the garden and an upcoming celebration of the garden, Elizabeth Lawrence and her legacy of garden writing. Join us!

The healing power of gardens and nature is well known to almost anyone who gardens and has been recorded by gardeners, landscape designers and medical practitioners as far back as antiquity. This week on Cultivating Place we’re joined by Dr. Clare Cooper Marcus, a leader in the field of evidence based research, education and design of what are alternatively known as healing gardens and therapeutic landscapes. Join us!

In the realm of gardenways and traditional garden design being inextricably interwoven with a culture, for me the garden design and techniques, and gardens associated with Japanese culture stand out. This week on Cultivating Place, we’re joined by Leslie Buck whose new book, “Cutting Back: My Apprenticeship in the Gardens of Kyoto,” recounts her experience during a three-month intensive apprenticeship with one of the most prestigious landscape and design firms in the storied city of Kyoto learning about her garden art form of aesthetic pruning, while at the same time learning much more about herself. Join us!

When you hear the phrase "gardens of the wild, wild west," what comes to mind? For gardener, author and radio host Mary Ann Newcomer of Boise, Idaho, there’s a long history of intrepid plants, gardens and gardeners that come before her — from the first peoples to the settlers who traveled West as pioneers in the 1800s. On Cultivating Place this week, Mary Ann (AKA The Dirt Diva on the Boise radio waves) shares some of the lessons that we might learn from these histories of plants and plants people no matter where we garden. Join us!

Leslie Bennett is a garden designer of both English and Jamaican descent working out of Oakland, CA. With a Jamaican-born husband, a two year old son, and knowledgeable, passionate views about the importance of cultural heritage, on cultivating Place this week, Leslie shares her journey navigating the marriage of beauty, function, cultural property and the radical activism of gardening. Join us!

Late summer is fire season in the American West. A part of life. This week Cultivating Place speaks with Gary Ferguson, author of "Land on Fire: The New Reality of Wildfire in the West," a collection of scientific lectures about wildfire, which at their best serve as a window into the larger issue of our relationship to the natural world.